#Inaug2013: Taking a Twitter deep dive

President Barack Obama, Katy Perry and Beyoncé were the obvious yet predictable Twitter stars of Inauguration Day. But so, too, were @Christiana1987 (talking about African-American pride), @Lohanthony (on what a cool dude the president is), and a star from TV’s “Basketball Wives” mooning over first lady Michelle Obama’s style.

A medley of the wildly popular and relatively anonymous served up the tweets that drove the most intense conversations as the 44th president took the oath again, according to new software tested for the first time on a large scale by Edelman Public Relations.

The software, dubbed Flow140, yielded decidedly different results from the traditional Twitter trending list because it wasn’t aiming for the most popular terms but the most frequently retweeted remarks in specific, usually short, periods of time. The software graphed out real-time clusters of conversation, promising to predict what might go viral before it actually happens.

What’s more, the graphing program is able to identify the Patient Zero — the original tweeter — who infected the Web.

“We hope to know if the topic of conversation is going to be Aretha Franklin’s hat before anybody knows that that’ll be the topic of conversation for the next 24 hours,” said Tod Donhauser, Edelman’s executive vice president over the technology policy group, as he gave POLITICO a sneak peek of the software during the proceedings. “We’ll be able to see that conversation starting before anybody does.”

It’s no surprise technologists at firms like Edelman are racing to crack the riddle of how information moves across Twitter, given the medium’s astonishing growth. The 2009 Inauguration saw a total of 82,000 tweets; Twitter said it handled 1.1 million tweets Monday related to the ceremonies. It could have been even more, many say, were it not for cellphone problems that frustrated many in the crowd.

While nothing really broke out this year quite like the bizarre chapeau worn by the Queen of Soul or the oath flub committed by Chief Justice John Roberts in 2009, Flow140 was able to isolate several moments in which thousands of people reacted or retweeted.

The day’s top moments, not surprisingly, included the traffic coming from both @BarackObama and @WhiteHouse — the biggest moment being the Twitter declaration that the president had just taken the oath, retweeted more than 11,000 times.

Flow140 was also, in real time, able to see what lines of the president’s address were resonating. The moment that dominated early on: “We do not believe that in this country, freedom is reserved for the lucky, or happiness for the few.” While the speechwriters clearly intended the refrain “We, the people” to take off, none of those tweets got the same sort of traction.